Featured Directors

Featured quote (not written by me)

Cultural critic James Wolcott, on the new film critic:

"Film critics today have become these rabid completists... They feel like that with festivals, they have to see everything, no matter how minor. Part of it is bragging rights. The other part is that the only thing that feeds into their movie writing is other movies."

If Reckless, the Romeo and Juliet-style vehicle for Aidan Quinn and Daryl Hannah contains the most overtly sexual high school dance sequence in all 1980s teen films (with the pair ogling each other to the sound of Romeo Void’s Never Say Never featuring the all too subtle lyric, “I Might Like You Better if We […]

I am not the audience for this movie. I know this. I’m straight and male, and I thought the TV show was hideously written, like a misogynistic and glib gay man’s fantasy of what fashionable women in NYC are like, unknowingly miserable, shallow, and stupid. Is it fair for me to judge the film, especially […]

Good news. The mediocre movie is getting a lot better. Raising the forgettable bar without any effort is the second Paul Rudd high/no concept comedy in the last few months, I Love You, Man. With the Role Models DVD release piggybacking the I Love You, Man TV spot and the 2008 copyright date on ILY,M, […]

Now on DVD and Blu-Ray

Whenever there’s a genre parody or ode to a specific era of films, such as Black Dynamite’s mocking of Blaxploitation films or Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, the second half of Grindhouse, the danger is that the film might fall into the trap of either being condescending without any particular insight, or so faithful that it becomes the very flawed thing it is emulating.

Black Dynamite has nothing new to say about Blaxploitation films, it just does a decent job of copying what an inept [...]

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Featured Quote (written by me)

On Cold Fish:

Though the 16 year old me described the 1994 weepie Angie, starring Geena Davis as a Brooklyn mother raising her new baby alone, as “maudlin and melodramatic,” Roger Ebert, during his TV review, referring to the multitude of soap-operaish problems piling up on the titular character, suggested that it was only in Hollywood where Angie would get a happy ending. “If they made this movie in France, Angie would have shot herself.”

Well Cold Fish was made in Japan, where Angie would have shot herself and that would have been the happy ending.